The International Journal of Press/Politics
Latest Publications

The rise of right-wing populist parties in Western democracies is often attributed to populists’ ability to instrumentalize news media by making deliberate provocations (e.g., verbal attacks on migrants or politicians from other parties) that generate media coverage and public awareness. To explain the success of populists’ deliberate provocations, we drew from research on populism and scandal theory to develop a theoretical framework that we tested in three studies examining the rise of German right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) between January 2015 and December 2018. In Study 1, an input–output analysis of 17 deliberate provocations by AfD politicians in German news media revealed much more coverage about their attacks on migrants than about their attacks on political elites, although all were covered in predominantly scandalizing ways. Next, Study 2, involving media database research and an analysis of Google Trends data, showed that the provocations had increased overall media coverage about the AfD and influenced public awareness of the party

In recent years, links between selective news exposure and political polarisation have attracted considerable attention among communication scholars. However, while the existence of selective exposure has been documented in both offline and online environments, the evidence of its extent and its impact on political polarisation is far from unanimous. To address these questions, and also to bridge methodological and geographical gaps in existing research, this paper adopts a media repertoires approach to investigate selective news exposure and polarisation in four Eastern European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Serbia. Using a combination of population surveys, expert surveys and qualitative interviews, the data for the study were collected between November 2019 and May 2020. We identify five types of news repertoires based on their relative openness to counter-attitudinal sources, and show that selective news repertoires are present in 29% of the entire sample. Our findings also reveal significant cross-country differences, with the more selective news repertoires more prominent in countries characterised by higher levels of polarisation. Furthermore, while the selection of news sources is in line with people's electoral (and to a lesser extent ideological) preferences, our findings show that exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can also be strongly correlated with political and ideological leanings. Our qualitative data suggest that this is because exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can reinforce attitudes, and potentially contribute to polarisation. Qualitative data also highlight the influence of environmental factors (e.g., family), and suggest that selective news consumption is associated with normatively different conceptions of media trust.

Despite the recent surge of women of color in elected political office in the U.S., the representation of Latinas is strikingly low. Past research offers unclear conclusions as to whether Latina political candidates face biases due to the intersection of their identities as women and as ethnic minorities, and how Latinas can navigate such biases. In this study, we identify how Latinas draw on their intersectional identities as both women and ethnic minorities to develop strategic campaign messages and how voters respond to such messages. Through an analysis of campaign advertising data and an original survey experiment, we show that Latina candidates do not face an automatic disadvantage based in gender and ethnic biases, but they can benefit from the intersection of these two identities, especially among female minority voters. These results are consequential because they offer insights into how to improve the descriptive and substantive representation of marginalized groups in the U.S.

Marked by both deep interconnectedness and polarization, the contemporary media system in the United States features news outlets and social media that are bound together, yet deeply divided along partisan lines. This article formally analyzes communication flows surrounding mass shootings in the hybrid and polarized U.S. media system. We begin by integrating media system literature with agenda setting and news framing theories and then conduct automated text analysis and time series modeling. After accounting for exogenous event characteristics, results show that (a) sympathy and gun control discourses on Twitter preceded news framing of gun policy more than the other way around, and (b) conservatives on Twitter and conservative media reacted to progressive discourse on Twitter, without their progressive counterparts exhibiting a similar reactiveness. Such results shed light on the influence of social media on political communication flows and confirm an asymmetry in the ways partisan media ecosystems respond to social events.

This analysis tests two distinct predictions regarding local newspapers’ coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. A public service view of local newspapers predicts that a robust local newspaper sector would mitigate the politicized national partisan rhetoric surrounding COVID-19; reducing the disparity in social-distancing behaviors between predominantly Republican and predominantly Democratic counties by increasing compliance in Republican counties. The alternative hypothesis, informed by a demand-side view of the market pressures local newspapers face, predicts that increased competition between local newspapers will increase the degree to which local newspapers amplify the rhetoric of national officials in line with the partisan composition of their community, further polarizing adherence to social-distancing behaviors across predominantly Republican versus predominantly Democratic counties. The results of this analysis offer strong support for the second hypothesis; but, an additional analysis of vaccination rates offers a more nuanced perspective than a simple public service versus demand-side dichotomy would imply.

Research in political communication has recently begun to explore the role of non-Western English-language state-funded international broadcasters (NEIBs) in influencing international audiences. Despite this, there has been little attention given to understanding how NEIBs engage and influence young people in ‘Western’ democracies. Our article addresses this gap by providing a detailed analysis of RT's English-language, youth-orientated news product ICYMI. Launched in 2018, ICYMI is a social media-based news brand that consists of a series of 2–3-min videos that deliver satirical takes on recent global events including military conflict, financial scandals, and culture clashes. Our findings, which examine the first year of the platform's activity, show that ICYMI is a novel form of engagement, one that is not easily categorised as either public diplomacy or propaganda, nor can it be described as traditional journalism. Instead, we label this approach as geopolitical culture jamming. In this article, we conduct a discourse analysis of 45 videos published on YouTube by ICYMI over its first year to examine how the platform attempts to influence how young people relate to traditional foreign policy discourses. Our empirical analysis centres on how viewers engage with and interpret ICYMI's videos with the aim of addressing how RT may be influencing younger audiences, particularly its core demographic of Anglophone white males whose comments reflect an attachment to ICYMI's populist, anti-elite worldview.

The FridaysForFuture movement (FFF), launched by Greta Thumberg's school strikes in 2018, has led a new wave of climate activism worldwide. Young people are at the forefront, with social media serving both as mobilizing tools and expressive spaces. Drawing upon literature on youth and digital activism with a generational, situated approach, we account for how both the climate struggle and social media are appropriated by FFF-activists as part of their own youth grassroots politics. Moreover, we explore the activities they mix and the strategies they adopt when moving across online and offline environments. From July 2020 to January 2021, we carried out 6 months of ethnographic work with(in) the FFF-Rome group by blending participant observation of assemblies and protests with digital ethnography on the homonym WhatsApp group. Results’ thematic analysis shows that FFF-activists believe climate activism to be their own fight and social media their own battlefield. A generational understanding of digital climate activism emerges at the intersection of the appropriation of the dispute (climate change) and the digital environments (social media). Findings also account for broader logics and strategies adopted by FFF-activists, on and beyond social media. They move seamlessly between online and offline, spanning across and negotiating with different platforms according to political goals and target audiences. These results contribute to overcoming reductive or marginalizing approaches to youth activism, to legitimizing and situating young activists’ social media usage practices within an array of grassroots political practices, and to understanding how generational belonging affects such practices in the Italian context.

In today's hybrid media environment new content creators challenge the status of professionally produced journalism and blur the lines between professional and non-professional content. Growing up in this information landscape, younger generations have developed news-related practices and attitudes that lie in stark contrast to those of previous generations. In addition, discrepancies exist between news definitions and the use practices of young people. We conducted focus groups with German adolescents (15–17 years), young adults (18–24 years) and adults (40–53 years) in August 2020 to uncover young peoples’ orientation toward news and journalism. Our study indicates that the boundaries of what journalism is and what it is not are becoming increasingly indistinct. However, distinctions do emerge between the journalistic and non-journalistic sources that adolescents and young adults use and the functions they associate with them according to their information needs. Differences between the age groups become apparent in their motivations to stay informed which highlights the important role non-journalistic sources play in information behaviour and opinion formation. For teenage participants especially, Social Media Influencers (SMIs) are relevant within these processes, which are linked to a perceived social duty-to-keep-informed. Moreover, findings from the focus groups highlight cohort-specific differences regarding the understanding of journalism and, consequently, differences in the assessment of trust and reliability as well as the verification strategies that are applied. In sum, for young participants journalism is a reliable source of information, especially in the case of current events and for crosschecking online information, while non-journalistic sources fulfil social needs.

Anecdotal evidence suggests a link between online message boards and the rise of far-right movements, which have achieved growing electoral success globally. Press accounts and scholarship have suggested these message boards help to radicalize like-minded users through exposure to shared media insulated from cross-cutting viewpoints (e.g., Hine et al. 2017 ; Palmer 2019). To better understand what role online message boards might play for supporters of right-wing populist movements, we focus on the Spanish political party Vox and its supporters’ use of the message board ForoCoches, a fan site for car enthusiasts, which became an important platform for the party. Using more than 120,000 messages collected from threads mentioning the party between 2013–2019, we examine the URLs shared to show how mainstream news media events shape the conversation online and how users not only were exposed but deeply engaged with cross-cutting news sources. We argue that the use of sites such as ForoCoches should be viewed in the context of a broader increasingly hybrid political and media landscape where activity online and offline cannot be understood separate from one another. Moreover, our findings suggest that the online political discussions that take place in Vox-related threads on ForoCoches resemble normatively positive deliberative spaces—albeit in this case in support of illiberal political positions. In other words, our findings complicate conventional notions about the benefits of political talk, especially online, as a democratically desirable end in and of itself.